"No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value."
… Bertrand Russell
I learned a great deal about effective teaching from my years teaching mostly physics in a Maryland public high school. Russell's words remind me of the responsibility and joy of "good" teaching at all educational levels. In this statement, I describe how I try to apply and model Russell's words in my work with pre-service teachers in my Secondary Science Teaching Methods course.
As a high school science teacher, I tried to provide my students with opportunities to grasp fundamental science concepts and engage in appropriate levels of scientific inquiry. This was an ambitious goal, and led me to always be striving to improve the learning environment in my classroom. Though it is widely accepted that teachers learn much of their craft from their classroom experiences, I believe that what I learned while teaching can benefit my pre-service teachers so that their transitions to becoming effective classroom teachers require less trial and error. The ideas that I try to communicate in the methods course include the importance of relating to and respecting students as individuals, the necessity of continuing to deepen one's scientific understandings, and the value of engaging students in meaningful classroom inquiry and collaboration.
The motto of the high school where I first taught physics was "Where People Are Important." Each year that I taught, my understanding of that phrase grew. I came to believe that a teacher's primary mission is to contribute to the positive development of each student, both in terms of what they know academically and what they know about being responsible members of our society. For my pre-service students, this means that in their classrooms, they have a responsibility for the growth of each child, no matter what their background or needs may be. To model this in my methods class, I try to get to know each of my students quickly and provide assignments, such as asking them to develop their own teaching philosophy, that allow them to grow in a direction that will make them better teachers. Each week, we talk about their practicum experiences and address issues that they encounter during their classroom observations.
Before a teacher can assess and address the needs of individual learners, he or she must have a deep understanding of the subject they are teaching. As a science teacher, it was not unusual for me to research topics that my students were curious about in order to answer their questions or to steer them towards fruitful avenues for their own investigations. I found out that even with a major in physics, my own understanding was often lacking, and I enjoyed developing my own understandings in order to help my students make sense of basic. Having a deep understanding of his or her discipline allows a teacher significant freedom to ask questions, conduct discussions and probe students’ understandings. For the pre-service teachers that take my course, I model how a teacher develops his or her understandings over the course of their career by requiring them to augment their understanding of a topic by “unpacking” the meanings of related national and state content standards, researching what we know about how students often misunderstand the topic, and assembling phenomena and representations that might help their future students refine their own knowledge.
Since we all experience many years of school as a student before becoming teachers, I think that it is important that pre-service teachers begin to think of themselves as teachers instead of students. Each year as a high school teacher, I wanted my students to progress from completing traditional assignments chiefly to earn good grades to engaging in solving complex scientific and engineering problems to experience the exhilaration of this type of achievement. Because I want the pre-service teachers in my course to see the work they do as an authentic foundation for the expertise they will develop as teachers, each assignment in the course yields an artifact that could be useful in their first teaching assignments. I enhance the authenticity of these assignments by broadening the audience that reads (and hopefully uses) them to include their classmates.
Once in the field, new teachers benefit from participation in a professional community, i.e. having access to colleagues with whom they can share their ideas and questions. With modern technology, such communities can be inside or outside particular schools because students are often permanently networked with friends and classmates on the Internet. With this in mind, I ask my students to coordinate their individual work with the efforts of their classmates preparing to teach in the same discipline. Throughout the course, they contribute their assignments to a shared online knowledge base and organize this collection into a resource for science teaching. In addition to my feedback, their peers review each contribution. By the end of our time together, this editable website, or “wiki,” contains our class’s learning principles, each student’s teaching philosophy, as well as a collection of course syllabi, article reviews, interpretations of standards, and instructional plans. In addition to the resources, I hop that This collaboration fosters a community of neo-practitioners that has the potential to stay interconnected as its members enter the teaching profession.
As a public school teacher, I learned a lot about being an effective teacher from my colleagues and students. One lesson that I learned early on was that students learn what a teacher does more readily than what he or she says. In my methods class, I try to model the importance of acknowledging the value of each student's potential contribution to the class, the importance of deepening one’s understanding of his or her discipline in order to engage each student's confusions, curiosities, and insights, and the importance of extending traditional views of learning by engaging students in authentic inquiry and collaboration. I hope that as my students begin teaching, they will see what I tried to teach them as valuable, appreciate the gravity of Russell's description of "good" teaching, and dedicate themselves to caring for and enriching the lives of each of their students.
Jay Fogleman
Teaching Philosophy
"No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value."
… Bertrand Russell
I learned a great deal about effective teaching from my years teaching mostly physics in a Maryland public high school. Russell's words remind me of the responsibility and joy of "good" teaching at all educational levels. In this statement, I describe how I try to apply and model Russell's words in my work with pre-service teachers in my Secondary Science Teaching Methods course.
As a high school science teacher, I tried to provide my students with opportunities to grasp fundamental science concepts and engage in appropriate levels of scientific inquiry. This was an ambitious goal, and led me to always be striving to improve the learning environment in my classroom. Though it is widely accepted that teachers learn much of their craft from their classroom experiences, I believe that what I learned while teaching can benefit my pre-service teachers so that their transitions to becoming effective classroom teachers require less trial and error. The ideas that I try to communicate in the methods course include the importance of relating to and respecting students as individuals, the necessity of continuing to deepen one's scientific understandings, and the value of engaging students in meaningful classroom inquiry and collaboration.
The motto of the high school where I first taught physics was "Where People Are Important." Each year that I taught, my understanding of that phrase grew. I came to believe that a teacher's primary mission is to contribute to the positive development of each student, both in terms of what they know academically and what they know about being responsible members of our society. For my pre-service students, this means that in their classrooms, they have a responsibility for the growth of each child, no matter what their background or needs may be. To model this in my methods class, I try to get to know each of my students quickly and provide assignments, such as asking them to develop their own teaching philosophy, that allow them to grow in a direction that will make them better teachers. Each week, we talk about their practicum experiences and address issues that they encounter during their classroom observations.
Before a teacher can assess and address the needs of individual learners, he or she must have a deep understanding of the subject they are teaching. As a science teacher, it was not unusual for me to research topics that my students were curious about in order to answer their questions or to steer them towards fruitful avenues for their own investigations. I found out that even with a major in physics, my own understanding was often lacking, and I enjoyed developing my own understandings in order to help my students make sense of basic. Having a deep understanding of his or her discipline allows a teacher significant freedom to ask questions, conduct discussions and probe students’ understandings. For the pre-service teachers that take my course, I model how a teacher develops his or her understandings over the course of their career by requiring them to augment their understanding of a topic by “unpacking” the meanings of related national and state content standards, researching what we know about how students often misunderstand the topic, and assembling phenomena and representations that might help their future students refine their own knowledge.
Since we all experience many years of school as a student before becoming teachers, I think that it is important that pre-service teachers begin to think of themselves as teachers instead of students. Each year as a high school teacher, I wanted my students to progress from completing traditional assignments chiefly to earn good grades to engaging in solving complex scientific and engineering problems to experience the exhilaration of this type of achievement. Because I want the pre-service teachers in my course to see the work they do as an authentic foundation for the expertise they will develop as teachers, each assignment in the course yields an artifact that could be useful in their first teaching assignments. I enhance the authenticity of these assignments by broadening the audience that reads (and hopefully uses) them to include their classmates.
Once in the field, new teachers benefit from participation in a professional community, i.e. having access to colleagues with whom they can share their ideas and questions. With modern technology, such communities can be inside or outside particular schools because students are often permanently networked with friends and classmates on the Internet. With this in mind, I ask my students to coordinate their individual work with the efforts of their classmates preparing to teach in the same discipline. Throughout the course, they contribute their assignments to a shared online knowledge base and organize this collection into a resource for science teaching. In addition to my feedback, their peers review each contribution. By the end of our time together, this editable website, or “wiki,” contains our class’s learning principles, each student’s teaching philosophy, as well as a collection of course syllabi, article reviews, interpretations of standards, and instructional plans. In addition to the resources, I hop that This collaboration fosters a community of neo-practitioners that has the potential to stay interconnected as its members enter the teaching profession.
As a public school teacher, I learned a lot about being an effective teacher from my colleagues and students. One lesson that I learned early on was that students learn what a teacher does more readily than what he or she says. In my methods class, I try to model the importance of acknowledging the value of each student's potential contribution to the class, the importance of deepening one’s understanding of his or her discipline in order to engage each student's confusions, curiosities, and insights, and the importance of extending traditional views of learning by engaging students in authentic inquiry and collaboration. I hope that as my students begin teaching, they will see what I tried to teach them as valuable, appreciate the gravity of Russell's description of "good" teaching, and dedicate themselves to caring for and enriching the lives of each of their students.